Qualcomm revamps phone chips for AI, signs up with Samsung and others

Qualcomm is applying technology originally developed for laptop chips to cell phone chips, aiming to make them more powerful when performing artificial intelligence-generating tasks.

The company hired a group of former Apple engineers in 2021 to help it design laptop chips, which have been available this year and power the AI features in Microsoft Windows.

Now, for the first time, technology developed by the team - a suite of custom computing technologies that Qualcomm has named “Oryon” - is being used in the company's phone chips.

Qualcomm has also reworked parts of the chip, called the Snapdragon 8 Elite, to handle tasks such as generating images and text. Qualcomm will provide special tools for software developers to utilize these parts of the chip, in addition to those already available in Alphabet's Android operating system.

Qualcomm said that companies such as Samsung Electronics, Asus Computer and Xiaomi will use the new chip.